New Wave

Being an architect is all about understanding the place where you’re building, and creating a structure that fits that place. Most of the time, you’ve got a relatively limited chance to absorb a place, and figure out the best solution for the spot.

When designing this Waikane home, though, architect Phillip Camp had the advantage of having grown up in the very house that he was replacing. “There are a lot of memories tied into this place,” he says. He would end up moving up the road to Waiahole Valley in high school, and then to Southern California for a degree and a career in architecture. But after returning to Hawaii five years ago and starting up his own firm, Hawaii Architecture LLP, Camp gravitated once again to the old family property overlooking Kaneohe Bay. This is where he would build the perfect home for his own new family. And when it was time to break ground, he was more than ready.

TIP: Venetian plaster adds a burst of color to this recessed media center.

“This place has been in the back of my head for a long time,” he says. “I was going through some old college stuff, and I have sketches showing elements of this house that actually got built.”

In fact, Camp says that the inspiration for the most distinctive feature of the house, its wavy barrel roof, came from hours spent out in Kaneohe Bay, looking back at his old house set against the Koolau Mountains. “I remember thinking how great it would be to have a house that fit in perfectly with the ridges behind it,” he says. “When you’ve got an amazing landscape like this, you don’t want your house to stick out like a sore thumb.”

The rolling wave of a roof also allowed him to indulge his avant-garde tendencies without coming across in willful opposition with the surrounding houses. “I really respond to modern, minimalist design, but I wanted to make sure it looked like it made sense here,” says Camp.

A bit of a challenge, of course, in an older, rural community such as Waikane, where the built environment mostly comprises ad hoc houses originally built for economy, and offers little in the way of inspirational architectural design cues. “There’s nothing wrong with the old Hicks homes,” says Camp. “but they’re not going to serve as an architectural vernacular by any stretch.”

But Camp’s old connection with the place and its people did have a substantial impact on his design. He even shifted the massing of the entire structure out of a very kamaaina sense of respect for nearby residents. “I didn’t want to kill the makai view of our neighbors up the road, so I moved the bulk of the house’s volume off to one side of the site.”

The rec room upstairs offers an open, airy place to entertain guests.

Photo: by Olivier Koning

The resulting house is one of a kind: swoopy, asymmetrical, spare—and yet somehow perfectly suited to its environment.

Inside, Camp made the most of the unconventional, lopsided space. The heart of the house is the living room, which features a ceiling height that swings dramatically from normal on one side to hugely tall on the other, and offers a perfectly framed view of Kaneohe Bay and Chinaman’s Hat in between.

It’s overlooked by an equally dramatic second-story rec room, which takes up the uppermost area created by the swelling roofline.

The four bedrooms of the house, in contrast, are relatively small, and tucked away, all in a line on the far end of the first floor. The master bedroom suite does look out onto the ocean, but its vista is nothing compared with the one on display in the living room.

Camp says he intentionally favored the living room and rec room when apportioning out the layout. “It was primarily a product of how we like to live,” he explains. “Where do you want to spend most of your time? Do you really need a huge bedroom with a sitting area? Some people do, but it comes at the expense of other areas of the house. We wanted to give the best views, the biggest spaces to the public areas, so when you’re up and at ‘em, having fun with your family and friends during the day, you can appreciate it better.”

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